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Game Food That Intercepts Nachos

IT is only a small exaggeration to say that Rick Bayless has dedicated his life to taking Mexican food seriously — and persuading the rest of us to do the same.

Mr. Bayless's study of Mexico began with years of academic work in linguistics and anthropology, but he couldn't stay out of the kitchen. (He grew up in a family of restaurant owners, in Oklahoma City.)

Since 1987, at his Chicago restaurants Frontera Grill and Topolobampo; in 65 episodes of a PBS documentary about authentic regional Mexican cooking; and in three uncompromising cookbooks, Mr. Bayless remained committed to making tortillas from scratch, tracking down fresh epazote at any cost and fire-roasting every tomato, onion and chili that crossed his path.

"I realized that I was losing people," he said recently. "Just the first step of a recipe would involve finding four different kinds of dried chilies, toasting them, puréeing them, straining them and cooking them." The 100 recipes in "Mexican Everyday" make liberal use of shortcuts like canned beans, tomatoes, jalapeños, salsa, chipotles in adobo and even the occasional supermarket tortilla chip.

"Chips and salsa, chips and guacamole, nachos, those are the entry points for Mexican food for a lot of Americans," he said, also describing what many of us will be eating in front of the TV while watching the Super Bowl this Sunday. "But you can go a lot further into this food without a lot more work."

Having cooked my way through more than a dozen of the recipes, I can say that the true bright flavors of real Mexican food are intact — and the speed with which you can produce them is almost unnerving.

The recipes here for meatballs, subs and beans use quick and practical substitutions, like Muir Glen canned roasted tomatoes, feta cheese for queso fresco and bacon for chicharrones, to excellent effect. With a little advance planning, you can practically put them together at halftime.

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I stopped using Mr. Bayless's earlier books, except for research, after a messy wrestling session with a soup that gets its rich flavor and creamy texture from fried stale tortillas. At its end, having pulled burned clumps of tortilla strips from a kettle of boiling oil, I decided to throw in good tortilla chips instead and call it a day. The skies did not open and the kitchen gods did not throw lightning bolts down in punishment; in fact, the soup was excellent. That's just the kind of careful shortcut this new book calls for. (But watch what you choose: for example, Mr. Bayless said that Doritos, made from extruded cornmeal paste, don't work as well as chips made from whole tortillas.) His previous books, Mr. Bayless said, were an attempt to preserve traditional ways of cooking and eating, especially for festivals and religious holidays.

"No one in Mexico cooks like that every day," he says now. "When I found that my friends in Oaxaca weren't even roasting their chilies for yellow mole any more, I decided to look at some different ways of doing things." Mr. Bayless travels to Mexico about five times a year, including an annual trip for 35 members of his restaurant staff, more than half of whom are Mexican or Mexican-American. He said that their intimate knowledge of modern Mexican home cooking was also a major influence on the book.

Mr. Bayless's fans seem grateful for this reprieve.

Amy Delgado, a legal secretary in San Diego, said that she hadn't cooked from his previous books, though she'd bought them after watching his series "Mexico: One Plate at a Time."

"That food looked very interesting, and it was my heritage" she said. "But my grandmothers buy their pico de gallo and tortillas at the supermarket, and I love their food."

Mr. Bayless is philosophical about his retreat from the barricades of tradition and authenticity, befitting a chef who once endorsed Burger King's chicken sandwiches. But he does draw the line somewhere.

"I will never be someone who puts melted cheese on everything," he said. "That just is not Mexican cooking."